SCO Group CEO Darl McBride: “no more lawsuits”

The SCO Group is holding its annual SCO Forum. In an interview at the event, …

In a recent interview, SCO Group CEO Darl McBride shares his vision for the future of SCO. Most notably, he declares that SCO is going to be shifting its focus away from litigation towards its ostensible core business, Unix. In fact, he does not anticipate filing any further lawsuits:

"I think right now we've got the claims in front of the various courts that we need in order to get our complaints heard and to get them argued and to get resolution. With respect to being more vocal or going after new targets at the customer level, we don't see the need for that. We had the need to get the basic issues on the table, but we're fine to argue the merits of what we have out there right now (in) the current litigation setting."

Given that recent court rulings have made it clear what the judges think of the "basic issues on the table," further litigation would likely be a waste of what's left of SCO's bankroll. Given that setback and the fact that BayStar (the venture capital firm which had invested US$50 million) is threatening SCO with legal action to recoup its investment, SCO is apparently losing the stomach for more legal battles.

McBride is using this week's SCO Forum 2004 to tout the company's strategy. They recently filed for a trademark on Unix Systems Laboratories, AT&T's old Unix division, which looks from here like an attempt to give them some old school Unix street cred. In addition, they are apparently looking at resurrecting Project Monterrey (a failed collaboration with IBM to port Unix to the Itanium) and possibly working on a 64-bit version for the Opteron and Xeon CPUs. Of course, if their current litigation efforts turn out the way just about everybody but SCO expects, they probably will not be around long enough see any of those plans come to fruition.